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Blogs » Archive for February, 2007
The Value of Email Marketing
On average, email marketing generates an average return of $51.45 for every dollar spent in 2006, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
If that statistic alone doesn’t convince you of the value that email marketing can add to your business, nothing will! Of course, there are heaps of reasons why email marketing is so popular — it’s extremely cost-effective and timely, it helps build lasting relationships with specific segments, sub-segments, and even individuals within your audience, it integrates well with other marketing tactics, including viral marketing, and so on — but that statistic really should make anyone who operates online sit up and take notice.
Are you making that kind of money from your email marketing efforts?
This was the first question that came into my head when I read that DMA statistic in the opening chapters of the recently released Email Marketing Kit. I mean, we’ve been conducting email campaigns for more than six years now — longer if you take into account our electronic newsletters — and I think we’ve got it down to something of a fine art. This is not to say that we know everything and can write top-notch email first time, every time, but we …
Books for Beers at SXSW!
If you’re attending the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, TX next month, there’s no need to bother running around collecting stamps in order to win free books (who has time for that when there’s partying to be done?) All you have to do is buy one of the SitePoint crew a beer!
Yes, four representatives of the SitePoint team (including the two co-founders) will be at SXSW, sitting in on panels, gate-crashing parties and giving away freebies left, right and centre.
We’ll have a truckload of cool schwag to give away: some of our newest books will be up for grabs, as will those SitePoint t-shirts that were so popular at Web Directions South. All we’re asking in return is that you buy us a beer, and we’ll give you your free book (and maybe a t-shirt)!
How easy is that?
What’s more, rumour has it that a number of advance copies of SitePoint’s yet-to-be-released book, The Art & Science Of CSS, are going to be couriered to SXSW the moment they roll off the press, so you may even be able to score a copy before it becomes available in any …
Psst…. ‘The Principles of Beautiful Web Design’ now available here.
So, a month or two back many of you spotted Jason Beaird’s ‘The Principles of Beautiful Web Design’ in our ‘Upcoming Titles’ list and you want to know where in the Sam Hill is it?
Officially… we’re not scheduled to release it till next week.
However, given so many people are psyched about it, rather than answer one more email with ‘Hang in there — it’s coming’, I can tell you it’s now available immediately, but only via the special link below.
https://sitepoint.com/bookstore/go/83/f1c36a/4179ea3aaf
Amazon actually have this book listed, but they’ve already sold out of their initial stock run (which they only just received a few days ago). To be honest, the popularity of this book has blown us away - it had a sales rank of #59 early in the week and #2 in the Computers & Internet category — which is a stunning result. To put that into perspective for you, in the colossal book cosmos that is Amazon, we generally consider anything under 1,000 a top seller.
Consequently, right now sitepoint.com (at this link) is the only way you can get this book …
Wrap Your NameValue Variables
ASP.NET gives a developer a lot of loosely typed key-value collections in which to stash stash variables, depending upon persistence needs. The short list includes ViewState, Session, Application and HttpContext.Items. These collections can come in very handy when one needs to keep an object around outside of a single request or shuttle things between different bits of the http pipeline. But it comes at a price—these collections are loosely typed, just returning Objects. Moreover, there is no compile-time checking to ensure that you are requesting the right key in the right place. Errors can lead to crashes at best, and interesting data corruption at worst. Here is a handy technique to avoid such issues.
News Wire: PHP Group accused of security incompetence
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PHP Group accused of security incompetence
“PHP developer Stefan Esser has said he will go ahead with plans to disclose dozens of security flaws in PHP in March, hitting back at criticism that the “Month of PHP bugs” project is nothing more than dangerous, self-serving publicity.”
(tags: php security) -
URL Rewriting to Prevent Duplicate URLs
A brief refresher on why it’s a good idea to avoid having your content accessible via multiple URLs (note: redirects are fine), and how to implement URL rewriting on an IIS server so you don’t have to lose sleep over it.
(tags: iis http search) -
Building the YUI Browser History Manager
Yahoo! engineer Julien Lecomte blogs about his experience writing the new Browser History Manager in the Yahoo! UI Library (YUI), and the difference between this new solution and previous aproaches to the Back button in Ajax applications.
(tags: yahoo! javascript) -
Free Hosting of YUI Files from Yahoo!
Following in the footsteps of Dojo, which offered up free hosting of its JavaScript library thanks to AOL late last year, Yahoo! is allowing developers to link to the YUI library files on its own servers for free.
(tags: …
Handling JavaScript-disabled Browsers
The following is republished from the Tech Times #159.
Previously, I mentioned that you should consider three main groups of people when adding JavaScript to your site—users without JavaScript capabilities, users without a mouse, and users of screen readers—and that supporting each of these three groups becomes progressively more difficult. In this post, we’ll focus on the first group, and discover how very easy it is to accommodate them with the right approach.
In the introductory JavaScript book I’m currently co-writing, one of the first big examples is an accordion control. This user interface element collapses a series of content blocks so that only their headings are visible, and then allows the user to expand the blocks one at a time by clicking on the headings.
This is a great example of how the right approach can accommodate users without JavaScript support (or with JavaScript disabled) with no extra work.
It can be tempting to write the CSS code of your page so as to collapse the blocks of the accordion control, and then write JavaScript code that will expand the blocks on cue. But disable the JavaScript, and users are left with the collapsed blocks and no way …
JavaScript Isn’t Evil
The following is republished from the Tech Times #159.
Following my Avoiding Evil JavaScript editorial last issue, I got a great deal of contradictory feedback. It’s not surprising, given the strong opinions that people tend to have about accessibility and its importance on the Web.
Nevertheless, before I show you some easy and practical ways to write better JavaScript, I’d like to clear up one common misunderstanding that I found in some of that feedback.
JavaScript itself is not evil, nor are the web sites and applications that provide a slick, enhanced user experience using JavaScript. What I call “evil” is the use of JavaScript in such a way that it needlessly prevents some users from being able to access the site or application.
It’s usually not only possible but quite practical to build your slick, JavaScript-powered user experience on a foundation of standard HTML and CSS. This foundation enables you to deliver your site’s content not only to users browsing with JavaScript disabled, but also to automated systems like search engines.
With a little extra thought, you can even make your JavaScript functionality play nicely with assistive technologies, and work well for keyboard-only users.
But things start to fall apart when Ajax enters …
See you at Dx3 in Boston!
The following is republished from the Tech Times #159.
With the new year well underway, I’ve begun to make my travel plans for 2007. My first speaking engagement for the year will be the Dx3 Conference in Boston, May 15-18.
The conference will focus on the various design methods, development techniques, and deployment platforms that are available to developers and designers who are beginning to think about the rich experiences and possibilities that exist beyond the web browser.
I’ll be giving two talks at the conference:
APIs and Mashups: Bringing the Web to the Desktop
All the big players are competing for their slice of the API pie. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! all want you to use their maps. Amazon’s API has the scoop on just about any product you can buy. Impressive web-based mashups and affiliate programs abound, but the browser imposes limits on how much can be done. Could the desktop, ironically, be the stage for web APIs to come into their own? And if so, which of the new desktop platforms (WPF? Apollo? Java Web Start?) is best equipped to take advantage of them?
JavaScript the Right Way
JavaScript is the most powerful …
News Wire: Dojo, jQuery, and YUI forge ahead
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RESTful Rails Development PDF Released
A free 30 page PDF primer on building Rails applications using REST. The English is pretty patchy given it has been translated from German, but some of the examples are great. (thanks, mattymcg)
(tags: rubyonrails) -
Find A Domain Name You Want To Show Off
A list of tools to help you find a great domain name. (thanks, SRTech)
(tags: business) -
Em Calculator
A handy tool for calculating font-size values in ems to achieve desired sizes in pixels at the browser’s default font size. Offers a nice, visual way to factor in the effects of inheritance. (thanks, bsytko)
(tags: css design) -
iText 2 released!
iText, the powerful, free, and open source Java library for manipulating and generating PDF documents has just announced its 2.0 release. This version adds support for a number of Acrobat 8 features, and removes a number of obsolete classes and methods.
(tags: java acrobat opensource software) -
Ajax Form Validation Using Spring and DWR
Client-side validation can drastically improve your forms, but it can lead you to write twice as much validation code. This article shows how to use the DWR Ajax library to …
Quick ‘n’ Dirty Color Correction with LAB Color
(Republished from the SitePoint Design View #30)
If you’re anything like me, Photoshop’s LAB Color option has always headed the list of ’strange things to ignore in Photoshop’. Like most designers I know, I’d long ago decided that two color spaces — RGB and CMYK — were more than enough for this little black duck.
That was until I came across Dan Margulis’s Photoshop LAB Color a little while back. I must admit that when I ordered this book I wondered to myself how anyone could write 350+ pages about a single color space. After working through the book, I can see that Dan probably could have written a lot more.
Make no mistake — LAB color is a little weird. Familiarity with either RGB or CMYK probably won’t have done a lot to prepare you for working in the alternative universe that is LAB color.
Although that weirdness is no doubt a major reason for your average Photoshop user to ignore LAB color, it’s also at the heart of LAB color’s real power. The color model behind LAB color is so ‘left-field’ that it has the ability to describe colors that don’t even exist (outside the …
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